Ignorance: A Novel - Hardcover

Roberts, Mich�le

3.19

517 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1608197719 ISBN 13: 9781608197712

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2013

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In every war there are stories that do not surface. You can try to forget, but sometimes the past can return: in the scent of a bar of soap, in whispers darting through a village after mass, in the color of an undelivered letter.

Jeanne Nerin and Marie-Ang�le Baudry grow up side by side in the Catholic village of Ste. Madeleine, but their worlds could not be more different. Marie-Ang�le is the grocer's daughter, inflated with ideas of her own piety and rightful place in society. Jeanne's mother washes clothes for a living. She used to be a Jew until this became too dangerous. Jeanne does not think twice about stealing food when she is hungry, nor about grasping the slender chances life throws at her. Marie-Ang�le does not grasp; she aspires to a life of comfort and influence. When war falls out of the sky, the forces that divide the two girls threaten to overwhelm those that bind them together. In this dizzying new order, the truth can be buried under a pyramid of recriminations.

Mich�le Roberts's new novel is a mesmerizing exploration of guilt, faith, desire, and judgment, bringing to life a people at war in a way that is at once lyrical and shocking.

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About the Author:

Mich�le Roberts is the author of twelve highly acclaimed novels, including The Looking Glass and Daughters of the House, which won the WH Smith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Half English and half French, Roberts lives in London and in the Mayenne, France. She is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia and was recently made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French government.

From Booklist:

The tragic consequences of conformity—in one woman’s life and in a continent at war—are on painful display in this multivoiced narrative. Jeanne, the central figure and most prominent narrator, is a poor, half-Jewish girl living in France as WWII approaches and arrives. She strays dangerously from convention as the war goes on, leaving her not just the Germans but her very neighbors to fear as well. Her rebellion begins in childhood after she, along with fellow convent boarder Marie-Angele, is abused by a religious figure. Marie-Angele, however, responds to this by becoming fiercely decorous, and in her righteousness becomes as much of a threat to Jeanne as any scapegoating hoard, suspicious German, or abusive cur�. Roberts’ characters are electric and affecting, her prose elegant. One reads in perfect confidence that the mosaic of voices will make a meaningful whole—but it doesn’t. There are hints of larger significance, intimations of pathos—but these seem unearned and false. In pieces, it is an illuminatingly narrow and feminine view of the war, but as a whole, this novel will leave some readers feeling disappointed. --Meg Kinney

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